Gift Ideas for the Animation Inclined

Plus: newsbits and two short films.

A still from Gay Purr-ee (1962)

Happy Sunday! Hope you’re doing well. Here’s the lineup for the latest edition of Animation Obsessive:

• 1) Our 2024 animation gift guide.

• 2) Sierra makes its free premiere online.

• 3) Inside Luki & the Lights.

• 4) Newsbits from around the globe.

With that, we’re off!

1 – Animation for Christmas

Even with the world in turmoil, Christmas is nearly here again. It’s our tradition to publish a gift guide each year — we’ve done so since 2021. Today, that tradition continues.

Our guides from 2021, 2022 and 2023 are packed with things we’d still recommend now. See the Karel Zeman collection, for example, or the complete Sherlock Hound. That said, we’ve gathered a totally new list of ideas this time. It will have something, hopefully, for people of all ages and interests.

Before we start, a note on availability. We’ve linked to Amazon where possible for ease of access, but we’re not affiliated with it and encourage you to buy elsewhere if you prefer. Also, this year, we have an “imports and rarities” section for harder-to-get items. Those are for adventurous buyers, but we feel they could be exciting gifts.

For viewing

• Gay Purr-ee (Amazon) — UPA’s last great production, an explosion of color and creative design, is finally out on Blu-ray.

• Peter & the Wolf (Amazon) — This Blu-ray edition is the ideal way to watch Suzie Templeton’s Oscar-winning film, which remains a gem after all these years.

• Oskar Fischinger: Ten Films (Center for Visual Music) — A DVD for any viewer with a taste for abstract animation and Fischinger’s bold, 20th century graphics.

• Gems of Hungarian Animation 1–3 (Amazon) — The definitive DVD box set of Hungarian animation, restored and with English subtitles. One we treasure in our own collection.

• The Breadwinner (Amazon) — For our money, Cartoon Saloon’s best movie, and an easy recommendation.

• Chie the Brat: 1st TV Series (Amazon) — Already a classic in Japan, this Isao Takahata series is now available to viewers abroad.

• The Wolf House (Amazon) — People who enjoy horror and left-field animation won’t want to miss the chance to own this one on Blu-ray.

• Short Peace (Amazon) — Katsuhiro Otomo’s anthology is strictly for adults, but full of great shorts.

• The Soldier’s Tale (Amazon) — A celebrated film whose credits include East Coast legends like animator Tissa David. It’s newly on Blu-ray.

• Robot Dreams (Amazon) — A key cult feature from last year.

• The Powerpuff Girls: The Complete Series (Amazon) — This DVD box set, released in May, boasts around 1,800 minutes of Powerpuff.

• The Boy and the Heron (Amazon) — By now, it needs no introduction. An obvious buy for anyone who doesn’t already own it.

• Deaf Crocodile’s catalog — This distributor does an excellent job on its Blu-ray editions of obscure animated films like Bubble Bath, Delta Space Mission and The Pied Piper. Well worth browsing for gift ideas.

For reading

• The Lost Notebook (Walt Disney Family Museum) — The secrets behind the visual effects of films like Pinocchio and Fantasia are revealed in this huge coffee table book.

• Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design (Amazon) — A coffee table book dedicated to the art of Saul Bass. His title sequences for films like Around the World in Eighty Days still echo in animation.

• Magic, Color, Flair (Walt Disney Family Museum) — Many pages of Mary Blair’s artwork, printed in high quality.

• Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales (Amazon) — After almost two decades, Clare Kitson’s is still the best English book on Norstein. Rich with photos and art.

• Princess Mononoke: The First Story (Amazon) — Hayao Miyazaki’s 1980 picture book, translated into English.

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind Box Set (Amazon) — A manga masterpiece that every Miyazaki fan should read at least once.

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Art and Creation of Walt Disney’s Classic Animated Film (Amazon) — All about Snow White, with lots of artwork. Out of print but widely available.

• Jin-Roh E-SAKUGA (Apple Books) — Tap through the key frames of Jin-Roh, the anime feature that’s helped to define animated realism for the past 25 years.

Imports and rarities

• The Millennium Actress Archives (Amazon Japan) — A new gathering of artwork from Satoshi Kon’s film. The book is in Japanese, but there isn’t much of a language barrier: images take up most of its pages.

• The Phantom Pippi Longstocking (Amazon Japan) — Also in Japanese, but an unmatched collection of the art that Miyazaki and artist Yoichi Kotabe did for Takahata’s never-made show.

• The Colors of Mary Blair (eBay) — For us, the Mary Blair book. It’s an out-of-print exhibition catalog, in Japanese and a bit tricky to buy, but it has hundreds of pages of art.

• Best of Viktor Kubal (eBay, Slovak Film Archive) — Kubal, a wholly unique Slovak animator, gets his work collected in a Blu-ray set with English subtitles.

• Old Czech Legends (Amazon France) — Very little of Jiří Trnka’s work is on Blu-ray, but this PAL release is the exception. It’s beautifully restored and in French and Czech. Availability is limited.

• The Czech Year (Amazon France) — Trnka’s first feature, restored and on PAL DVD. Likewise in Czech and French. Includes a restored copy of The Hand.

• Ocean Waves: The Visual Collection (Amazon Japan) — A brand new Japanese artbook for Studio Ghibli’s least-known feature.

• The Works of Yury Norshtein (Amazon Japan) — Maybe the greatest Norstein book published outside Russia. It’s brimming with photos and artwork, and some of the text is in English.

• Kazuo Oga Art Collection (Amazon Japan) — Still in print after almost 30 years, Oga’s first artbook is a joy to flip through for the images alone. It features background paintings from Totoro, Only Yesterday and Pom Poko.

2 – Worldwide animation news

Sierra, out for all

A still from Sierra (2022)

Earlier this week, Sierra came online for free. It’s a short from Estonia — we first saw it at a festival more than two-and-a-half years ago. Since then, it’s won dozens of awards all over the world, been shortlisted for the 2023 Oscar and gotten streamed by Criterion. Now, it’s on Vimeo.

Sierra makes more sense to watch than to read about, but it’s the surreal story of a race-driver father and his son, who eventually becomes a wheel on his dad’s car. The film is hilarious — but also poignant, and about struggles with masculinity and parental pressure. Plus, it’s done in flat, glitchy, lo-fi 3D animation that looks great.

A lot of people responded. By email, director Sander Joon tells us, “Sierra taught me that it pays off to be honest and open.” The way it resonated with live festival audiences was what showed him that he had something. In his words:

Making a short animation is like listening to the same joke over and over again. Eventually, you start to feel that no scene works anymore and worry that others will see the film the same way. It was a huge relief to watch the film with different audiences.

The highlight was the screening at the Ottawa Animation Festival, where I encountered the most reactive crowd. Coming from Estonia, it was quite a shock. The Ottawa audience cheered at the tiniest jokes and even at moments I never expected to get a reaction. Getting the audience award was the icing on the cake.

Joon was on the rise before Sierra, but this one was his breakthrough. He’s received commissions since it came out — even animating for a Reebok ad that played in Times Square. His film was so acclaimed that it became a bit intimidating.

“Logically, this [success] should give me all the confidence to continue. Paradoxically, I’ve set Sierra as a benchmark to improve upon, which has sometimes stopped me from pursuing personal projects over the past year,” he explains. “Fortunately, I’m surrounded by people who remind me that this isn’t the right way of thinking.”

The battle is ongoing as he develops his new film — which is too early for him to discuss yet. Even so, he offers hints: he’s still interested in “universally relatable anxieties,” animal characters and “the possibilities of mixing media.”

As he tells us, “All I can say is that I’m challenging myself to mix animation with filmed footage and star no humans.”

We’ll be looking forward to discovering more. Until then, you can check out Sierra in full below. We’re very glad that more people will finally get to see this one:

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Inside an Oscar contender

A still from Luki & the Lights

Sierra made the Oscar shortlist two years ago. Today, a new film is aiming for the next shortlist: Luki & the Lights.

Despite its light, cartoony look, its theme is intense. Luki is about ALS, formerly Lou Gehrig’s disease — for which there’s no known cure. Sascha Groen and her late husband, Anjo Snijders, came up with the idea after his diagnosis. “[T]hey struggled to explain the disease to their young children,” writes Toby Cochran, Luki’s director, by email. This project was their answer:

Sascha created a robot character with lightbulbs in its joints as a visual metaphor to help their kids understand the progression of ALS. That idea evolved into Luki, and Sascha and Anjo reached out to us to bring it to life as an animated short film.

Cochran is with California’s Big Grin Productions — Luki is its first short. The budget was small, and making the film real was difficult. He notes that “Sascha and Anjo initially raised money to get the project started.” Big Grin added to that amount, as did private investors. Alongside this, Luki got one of the special grants that Epic offers to projects made using its Unreal Engine software, which Luki was.

Even then, and with a number of people on the (largely remote and international) team opting to work for free, it was tight.

“In order to keep everyone going, my producer and I had to make some hard choices, and I essentially bet ‘the farm’ on the project,” Cochran writes. “Thankfully, this risk paid off, as we later gained support from Global Neuro Y Care and The ALS Association, which allowed us to cover the remaining costs and complete the film.”

Luki is about a robot (that is, Luki) who finds one day that his hand is malfunctioning. He tries to hide it, but his two friends notice that something’s wrong. There’s a diagnosis, an acceptance of the disease. Luki and his friends face it step by step. Over time, the lightbulbs across Luki’s body dim. He loses mobility, and his friends become his caretakers. In the end, he dies with them by his side.

It’s a difficult story (embedded above) that manages to avoid being either maudlin or hopelessly bleak. Big Grin developed it from the original outline by Groen and Snijders. “Everyone they met with prior wanted to significantly change the story, often for budget reasons,” Cochran writes. “I felt their outline had the fundamental pieces of a great story, but it needed guidance to create a proper narrative foundation.”

Tweaks were made: quite a few robots were boiled down into Luki’s friends, and the technical, medical side was grounded in a greater focus on story. Viewers needed to “care about Luki as a character” to make the emotions land.

For the style, the team used simple cartooning crossed with imperfection — something with visible brush strokes, something “lived in and with a story to tell.” It tied into Anjo Snijders’ love of handicrafts, and avoided an antiseptic, unrelatable feel that would’ve undercut the story. For similar reasons, Luki has “a softer, warm color palette to stand out from the overly saturated look of most animated projects,” Cochran notes.

Unreal was both an upside and a downside for Big Grin, which hadn’t used it before and learned as it went. Luki was a real-time project — basically an in-engine video game cutscene, although it doesn’t look like one. Working in real-time adds speed and flexibility, but also opens the door to problems. According to Cochran, one of the biggest:

… was glass and trying to get the lightbulbs to act like real lightbulbs. I needed the filaments to actually light up, glow and burn out in a believable way. We started working on the shaders for the bulbs in March of 2022 and were still tweaking them all the way to the end of production. Eventually, the team buckled down and rewrote everything, which sent a shockwave of bugs through the project. But my incredible team, who I called the SWAT crew, hunkered down and squashed every single bug until we had everything just right.

Luki’s had success at festivals and is sure to get more attention in the months ahead. But that isn’t the main reason it exists. The film is here for its message — and it’s been available online even amid its festival run, which is uncommon. Cochran tells us that his hope for the project is to start “meaningful conversations” and offer “comfort to families and children facing unimaginable challenges.”

“If one child watches Luki and is inspired to find a cure,” he writes, “then this project will have achieved something extraordinary.”

Newsbits

• The Iranian Oscar contender In the Shadow of the Cypress is free online right now. It’s really accomplished, with strong art direction and animation — well worth a look.

• In America, the terms of The Animation Guild’s tentative deal with Hollywood have been revealed. TAG’s proposal of strong protections against AI was rejected — and a number of union members aren’t pleased.

• Thorns and Fishbones, by the Portuguese director Natália Azevedo Andrade, is a surrealist film that really got our attention at a festival in 2021. We’ve been waiting for it to come online since — and it’s happened at last.

• The Indonesian feature Jumbo, due next year, now has a trailer. According to Suara, the film has been five years in the making.

• In Russia, Anton Dyakov (BoxBallet) spoke about his canceled films The Expeditor and Savely the Cat — the article includes many high-quality images of the latter. Based on his comments, it seems he’s trying to move on to new projects.

• Also in Russia, the debut animated shorts and educational animation shown at the Kinoproba festival are online for a limited time. This includes the grand prize winner Socks for the Star.

• The Garden of Heart, a compelling Hungarian short about a student’s attempt to get into art school, is also online.

• Flow by director Gints Zilbalodis (Latvia) won in the animated feature categories of the New York Film Critics Circle, the LA Film Critics Association and the European Film Awards. The president of Latvia celebrated that third victory with a tweet: “Flow is must see movie! So proud of our Latvian cinema team !”

• In America, BlkWmnAnimator has a sweeping, two-hour, career-retrospective interview with Bruce W. Smith (The Proud Family).

• Lastly, we wrote about Where the Wild Things Are (1975), Gene Deitch’s strange, wildly original take on the Sendak book — made with Sendak’s input.

Until next time!